


green new things

by darcylindbergh



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: First Kiss, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confession, M/M, The Night After the Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), the bookshop fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:22:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27193718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darcylindbergh/pseuds/darcylindbergh
Summary: The remains of the bookshop slump on its corner, blackened and mangled, no more than a shamble of bones and broken glass. The windows yawn into empty, hollow sockets; the front doors hang from their hinges, twisted and splintered by heat. Bricks have fallen here and there from the upper floors, littering the ground like so many teeth.The careful gold lettering above the door, A.Z. Fell and Co., has been scorched away.*After Armageddon, Crowley takes Aziraphale to see the bookshop.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley
Comments: 117
Kudos: 474
Collections: Racket’s 13 Days of Halloween





	green new things

**Author's Note:**

> Written for @racketghost's 13 Days of Halloween prompt list: bones, bonfire, and ghosts. 
> 
> Thanks, as ever, to @ladymacphisto for the beta. <3

Aziraphale falls asleep on the bus.

Crowley’s never seen Aziraphale sleep before. His face goes calm and smooth, quiet in a way that makes Crowley realise how much tension he usually holds in his corporation, restless underneath the surface. His head goes heavy on Crowley’s shoulder, and Crowley wishes he had another six thousand years to give him here tonight, to let him sleep.

He smells like smoke, a little. A little like electricity. Crowley suspects they both do: soot and ash from the burning Bentley is still streaked across his skin, and Aziraphale smells strangely _new_.

That’ll be the new corporation smell, Crowley supposes. It doesn’t smell like the way Aziraphale usually does.

It’s about an hour and twenty minutes back to London. Crowley lets the bus driver go a little under the speed limit the whole way.

*

The bus stops in front of Crowley’s building. The baffled driver pokes uselessly at a GPS he’s pulled up on his mobile, frowning, and Crowley carefully shakes Aziraphale awake, says, “Come on, angel. Let’s go in.”

Aziraphale blinks his eyes open, but doesn’t rise from his seat. He looks out the window at the tall, imposing building for a long moment, and then he says, “I want to see it.”

Crowley doesn’t have to ask what he means. The memory blazes in his mind, hot and furious and full with anguish. “Aziraphale. It’s gone.”

“I want to see it.”

“You don’t need to torture yourself like this. Let’s just go in, and we can go and have a look tomorrow morning.”

“Crowley.” He turns, looks up at Crowley with determination in his eyes, and something that might be a plea. It makes Crowley feel like his breastbone is shattering, like he’s swallowing his tongue whole. “Please take me to see it.”

Everyone else on the bus has been asleep for ages; they’ll never even miss these hours. The GPS on the driver’s mobile recalculates, and Crowley slides back into the seat next to Aziraphale as the bus lurches into motion.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale says, faint and brittle, and Crowley wishes he wouldn’t. Not for this.

“Next stop,” the driver announces, “Soho.”

*

The remains of the bookshop slump on its corner, blackened and mangled, no more than a shamble of bones and broken glass. The windows yawn into empty, hollow sockets; the front doors hang from their hinges, twisted and splintered by heat. Bricks have fallen here and there from the upper floors, littering the ground like so many teeth.

The careful gold lettering above the door, _A.Z. Fell and Co._ , has been scorched away.

Aziraphale stands on the pavement for a long while after the bus trundles off, taking in the sight with a tense jaw and unblinking eyes: the wood facade warping and peeling away under the force of heat and water, the dark smears of soot spilling down the windowsills, the yellow stretch of firefighter’s tape strewn over all of it, as if that would be enough to hold it all together. The shape of it, so hideously familiar, never to be the same again.

Crowley stands with him, swallowing down the images of flames and sirens, the terrible heat spilling out around him, the crackle of wood and paper. They’re silent, like a ritual watch standing over a casket; Crowley thinks about lilies, and about pyres, and about burial, all the different ways humans have said their goodbyes over the years, and wonders how any of it could be enough to say goodbye to this.

Then Aziraphale lurches to one side, taking a deep breath, and begins to pick his way forward.

“Angel,” Crowley protests, “don’t—” but if Aziraphale hears him, he doesn’t show any sign of it. Face blank, hands utterly still, feet crunching on charcoal and glass, he ducks under the yellow tape and pushes past the distorted doors to disappear inside.

Crowley does not want to go back in there. He doesn’t want to go back into the inferno, the vortex of fear and fire and sheer, unadulterated grief; he doesn’t want to see the burnt-out shell of the sofa, or the bare ribs of the bookshelves; he doesn’t want to see the white porcelain angel mugs filled with ash, or the horn of the gramophone melted away.

He doesn’t want to see Aziraphale in the bookshop like this—walking through visions of fire and flame in this cold, dead place, in these charred, skeletal remains of his life—but he can’t leave him alone to it, either.

 _We’re on our own side_ , he’d said, after all, and he’d meant it like a promise. Like a vow.

He takes off his sunglasses, and follows Aziraphale in.

*

Crowley finds him amid the rubble, sitting on the bottom rung of the spiral staircase with eyes unseeing. His white wings were already smudged to grey with soot and ash, folded protectively around himself. The floors are still flooded with water; the empty eye of the oculus opens to the night sky.

“Don’t,” Aziraphale says thickly, when he notices Crowley picking his way over the ruins of a column where it lies crumpled across the floor. “You shouldn’t come in here.”

Crowley does anyway.

The wrought iron staircase has gone frail in the fire, but Crowley expects it to hold their weight, and so it does. He climbs just past Aziraphale to sit close behind him, loosing his own dark wings into reality and curling them around Aziraphale, tucking him—white, smoky wings and all—inside his hold. Their feathers brush together, crackling with the static discomfort of the ethereal meeting the occult.

Aziraphale doesn’t draw away from it, though. He leans in a little harder instead, like it reminds him of who’s with him. Like it reminds him that he is not alone.

“Were you here?” Aziraphale asks, looking over the wreckage of the shop. “In the fire. You knew it had burnt, and you had Agnes Nutter’s book. You were here.”

“Yeah,” Crowley admits, closing his eyes against the images playing across his mind: the bright, hot flames, pages flying on the wind of the blaze. Sitting on the floor in the middle of it all, realising that Aziraphale was _gone_. “I was here.”

“And I wasn’t.” One of Aziraphale’s hands curls around one of Crowley’s ankles, gentle and grounding. “I’m so sorry you had to be here for that.”

He’s apologising for so much more than just the witnessing of the fire, Crowley knows. He’s apologising for having turned away, for having denied Crowley at the bandstand, for not having gone away with him to the stars. _I was gone, and you were alone_ , he’s saying. _I’m so sorry._

Crowley shrugs. The movement makes their wings shift against one another, sending shivers up his spine. He’s forgiven Aziraphale already, and this isn’t a time for comparisons of grief. “I’m sorry you have to see it like this.”

Aziraphale’s hand around his ankle is warm through his jeans, stroking his thumb around the jut of the bone there. Crowley isn’t sure which of them he’s soothing. He can’t see Aziraphale’s expression like this, sitting on the stair behind him. He’s not sure he wants to.

“I remember when this place was new,” Crowley says to him soft and low, as if anything more than a lullaby would send it all crashing down around them, crumpling and splintering to dust. “Back when the stacks were all organized, and you thought you’d sell a book every month.”

“The stacks are _always_ org—” the rest of the retort dies, scattering onto the floor amid loose pages and the crumbling remains of leather spines. His gaze sweeps over the shop, seeing it all again: not only the destruction of the shop as his home, but of his _collection_ , the tree of knowledge he had constructed here book-by-book, page-by-page, leafed in gold and poetry.

“I know,” Crowley says, pulling his wings closer around them. _I know_ _they were, according to your mad standards; I know it hurts, but we’re here_ _together._ “I remember the first time someone brought a first-edition folio of _Hamlet_ up to the register, like they meant to buy it. Thought you might smite them where they stood.”

“I should’ve let them,” Aziraphale murmurs, choking with regret. “Then it might have been saved.”

Of course, any book Crowley could conjure a memory for would be gone now, reduced to ash. He tries a different tact, undeterred. “Do you remember the time I came round in the middle of a snowstorm, and had to hide under the table in your backroom when Michael stopped by?”

Aziraphale is quiet, at that. Crowley takes it as a confirmation, a very hesitant _go on_.

“Or the first sushi place in London? We went and had a bunch of it packed up for us in hampers before proper takeaway existed, and ate ourselves sick on it, and you told me it was the devil’s food for being so _scrummy_.”

Aziraphale hums. There might even be a smile in it.

“What about the time I brought Warlock round on a weekend, popping in to grab you a book for the week, and lost him in the stacks upstairs? I still think he found a wormhole up there. He never did tell me where he’d been.”

“There’s never been a wormhole up there,” Aziraphale says, in the exasperated tone of someone who’s had to explain this before. “He was just a naughty, sneaky little boy, and you wore heels that always clicked and gave you away.”

“Or the time in the 70’s you brought a little _candy_ back here and ended up high off your tits for three days? I had to feed you pancakes until you finally sobered up enough to finish the sobering yourself.”

Aziraphale snorts, and then he sighs, and something in him relaxes a little further. “We’ve spent a lot of time here,” he says quietly.

Crowley’s hands come to rest, barely, on Aziraphale’s arms, as if he means to rub warmth back into them; he copies the slow, careful stroke of Aziraphale’s thumb. “Yeah, we have.”

The stillness of the bookshop settles in around them. Crowley begins to pick out areas he should probably look a little closer, places he thinks might harbor survivors of the bonfire: inside the black remains of the desk, in some of the more tucked-away stacks toward the back. The wall between the main shop and the back room has been burnt down to the studs, but through the remaining bits and pieces he can see the dark shape of a wardrobe that might have a thing or two kept safe, and downstairs in the cellar some of the wine might have survived.

He’s at least quite certain that a bottle or two of Chateauneuf-du-Pape will have miraculously come through.

“Do you remember,” Aziraphale says, then, “in 1941.”

Crowley shifts behind him, his hands slipping away from Aziraphale’s arms. A lot of things had happened in 1941—a lot of things they’d never talked about again, things they’d agreed, without words, never to address.

“Bits of it,” Crowley hedges.

“I remember it all so clearly,” Aziraphale goes on. He sounds far away, staring over at the lump of wire and scorched fabric that used to be a sofa. Crowley gets the sense that he doesn’t actually see it, though. “I was so angry with you, you know.”

Crowley does remember that, after a fashion. It’s not the emotion he would have picked, but he knows what Aziraphale is referencing: the taut silence in the Bentley, stretching out between them until it started to crack; the way Aziraphale had bullied him out of the car and into the shop with soft touches and deep frowns, guiding him at his elbow over to the sofa; the way he’d dropped the bag of books inside the door as if they hadn’t meant a thing.

He’d taken Crowley’s shoes off, and his socks, and had got to his knees to bathe his feet in cool, healing water, mouth tight and hands gentle, and he’d furiously made Crowley promise never to do anything so foolish again.

“I know,” Crowley says.

“I remember you fell asleep,” Aziraphale says, still in that thoughtful, far away voice. “And I sat for a long time, watching you. Wondering if you were still in any pain. Wondering what would make you do a stupid thing like that when all I was going to suffer was some paperwork. And you remembered the books, even when I forgot.”

“You did have other things on your mind,” Crowley reminds him. “The bomb, for one.”

Aziraphale shakes his head, and he twists in the hold of Crowley’s wings, abandoning his ankle to catch one of Crowley’s hands in his own. “I wasn’t thinking about the bomb, not really. I was thinking about you, and you weren’t thinking about yourself at all. You were thinking about the books.”

Crowley shifts, pinned to the spot by Aziraphale’s blue-glow gaze. “I trusted you,” he admits. “Of course I trusted you.”

“And then you let me take care of you.”

“You always take care of me.”

“I really haven’t,” Aziraphale says softly. “But that was when I realised, you know. That I wanted to. That I couldn’t bear not to.”

Crowley—Crowley doesn’t know what that means. “It’s fine, angel,” he says, with a little grin that’s trying its damnedest to break the tension building between them, curling thick and cautious in the sooty air. “On our own side, remember? Think you’re stuck with me now.”

Aziraphale doesn’t rise to it, doesn’t let the thread between them break under Crowley’s attempt to dismiss it. His eyes shine in the moonlight; he doesn’t let go of Crowley’s hand.

“This place is full of ghosts,” he whispers, raising one hand to Crowley’s cheek. Crowley tries not to lean into it. “This place has always been full of phantoms, haunting me with things I could have said, risks I could have taken. Moments that could have gone differently, had I the courage.”

Crowley has stopped breathing. He doesn’t dare let a thought into his head; he doesn’t dare make an assumption, a guess.

Doesn’t dare to hope. Not yet. Never yet.

Aziraphale must see it in him, because he turns on the step, settling on his knees between Crowley’s long legs. Their wings rustle and stretch out as they move—Aziraphale’s shifting behind him to spread into the open space of the burned bookshop, Crowley’s reaching after them, following them, huge and already turning grey themselves with the soot and debris heavy in the air.

“They’re ghosts of us,” Aziraphale says. His voice doesn’t break, and his eyes don’t shine, but Crowley can hear the pain in his chest as clearly as if it’s gone to seed in his own, as clearly as if it’s tugging apart his own ribs to lay him bloody and bare, and it’s ancient and full of violet-dark regrets, of words swallowed down to choking and, worst of all, of daydreams—long, lazy afternoons, soft mornings, silent glances exchanging secrets in the night. “Of what we could have been.”

“We couldn’t have,” Crowley answers, and he dares to clutch back at Aziraphale’s hand. The seed of hope he’s been crushing in his fist for years is prying at his fingers, begging to bloom. “It couldn’t have been anything else, angel.”

“It can now,” Aziraphale says simply, and then he kisses Crowley.

He kisses Crowley, folded together on the stairs, white and black wings turning grey with the dust of the bookshop swirling around them. The charred remains of the fire makes the kiss taste like smoke, and Crowley pulls Aziraphale in, holds him closer, _feels_ the heat of him, the warmth of him, the pounding of his heartbeat ringing through both their chests like a bell.

Aziraphale kisses him, and Crowley feels like a ghost being put to rest—whole, and complete, and eternal—and becoming something _new._ Something _together._ Something _loved_.

Hope is a green new thing, and it rises from the ashes of the burned, reaching, ever higher, toward the light.

*

They don’t spend much longer there.

Crowley recounts what it was like, to see it burn—he doesn’t mention the fear, naturally, but he senses that Aziraphale can hear it anyway between the recitation of rage—to think Aziraphale gone. It’s easier to talk about it than he would have thought, but he suspects Aziraphale’s hand, warm and dry in his own, has a great deal to do with it.

Aziraphale picks through the shop a bit, but it’s a futile effort. There isn’t much left.

“What hasn’t been destroyed by fire,” he complains, picking up a sopping wet book that might have once been a first-edition Wilde, or else Winnie the Pooh, “has been completely done in by the water. I’m not sure what they thought they were saving, really.”

“The building,” Crowley says, returning from the cellar with the miraculous Chateauneuf-du-Pape and an especially lucky bottle of 1895 Pol Roger champagne. “Structural integrity or something. Plus you’ve got neighbours that probably weren’t eager to get in on the bonfire.”

“Suppose I might rebuild,” Aziraphale says, sounding unconvinced, turning the pages of the soaked book. “Fire and water,” he muses absently. “What isn’t destroyed by fire—could be destroyed by water.”

Crowley takes the book from Aziraphale’s hands, putting it back on the pile that used to be Aziraphale’s desk. “Come home with me,” he says, pressing a kiss to Aziraphale’s temple. The angel’s electric smell has been replaced with the scent of the charcoal and soot, and it makes Crowley’s chest ache. “We need showers, and a bite to eat. We can come back in the morning when it’s light and take stock.”

“May not make it ‘til morning,” Aziraphale answers with a sigh, “not with Heaven and Hell on our tails.”

“Then it won’t matter anyway.”

Aziraphale hesitates, but then he’s turning into Crowley’s hold and allowing himself to be lead out, picking their way back across the rubble and ruin. Crowley holds one of the twisted doors open so that Aziraphale can make his way out through the half-collapsed entry, and just before Crowley closes the door behind them, he thinks he catches sight of the desk again, whole and shining, the way it always had been.

Must be a trick of the light.

Aziraphale has stopped on the pavement, looking back at Crowley with something soft and meaningful in his eyes. “Home?” he repeats. “Together?”

Crowley forgets about the desk instantly, and about the shop, and about every other little thing. He steps in, kisses Aziraphale slowly, answering every question Aziraphale’s never dared to ask. _Home, together, y_ _es,_ he says, with every careful press, with every brush and dip, hands coming up to cradle Aziraphale’s face. _Yes, yes, yes, yes yes._

“If you like,” he says, out loud.

“Yes,” Aziraphale says back. _Yes, yes, yes._ “I rather think I do.”

Together, they go home. 

*

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr @forineffablereasons!


End file.
